


we are the window full of starving eyes

by obfuscatress



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse, Post-SPECTRE, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, intra-canon extension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-05 23:02:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11023434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obfuscatress/pseuds/obfuscatress
Summary: There are no sunsets in the flashing lights of the ambulance barricade.





	we are the window full of starving eyes

**Author's Note:**

> For Carol. Huge thanks to [isthisrubble,](http://isthisrubble.tumblr.com/) [thatgirlnamedeleanor,](https://thatgirlnamedeleanor.tumblr.com/) and [queenofsm](https://queenofosm.tumblr.com/) for BETAing this monstrosity.
> 
> Can be read as a post-canon continuation of [yellow smoke (rub your muzzle on the window pane)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7156928) or as a separate work. There is also a playlist for this fic to be found either on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/obfuscatress/playlist/12IkicZY38orCYIt6jE1mG) or on [Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfX4qJsjL-ClMa0vDNGE2alwL395G9UvJ) with a tracklist available [here.](http://obfuscatress.tumblr.com/post/157729710977/we-are-the-window-full-of-starving-eyes-a) The title for both is from Keaton Henson’s _The River._

 

**_“Hold all my clichés / They are tipping my tongue to tell you that it’s love”_ **

_-Time is Dancing, Ben Howard_

 

* * *

 

The bridge with its two ends feels miles apart from where Madeleine is standing, MI6 a collection of figures backlit by another set of flashing lights like the ones behind her and James amid the rubble pointing a gun toward Blofeld. _If he does this now_ , she thinks and her mind draws a fearful blank. If he does this now, decides to finish this once and for all, she will be watching an execution, unable to turn away even though her heart is kicking up a panicked storm. Somewhere inside, she is nine years old holding the gun herself. Another part of her, scratched up and bruised from two weeks of crossfire, wants him to pull the trigger.

On the other side, the silhouettes stand motionless, a hand of the highest authority raised to pause the scene. They are all waiting.

James’ words are inaudible. The motions of ejecting the magazine and emptying the chamber of his handgun, though, are universally recognisable.

For a moment, as he looks the other way, Madeleine is painfully aware of just how hopeful she looks, all her weight on the balls of her feet as she leans forward. M must be feeling the same: two owners and one dog. James turns, starts walking.

Amid the smoke and the chaos, he looks strangely human even in henchman’s black and carrying a gun. He crosses the boundary ripped into the concrete by a falling helicopter and just like that she’s won the tug of war. The remnants of his gun go flying and the smile he cracks makes her insides bubble with disbelief.

There are no sunsets in the flashing lights of the ambulance barricade, but they have survived the wrath of this world and that has to count for something.

 

* * *

 

The whole time they sit on the tube, Madeleine can’t feel a thing. Westminster begins to shut down radially outward, people flooding into the streets with emergency warnings blaring through every open news channel. The footage is all flames and government squads storming pavement. “Terrorist attack,” a reporter says, and they keep walking on, hand in hand.

It takes a while to find an underground station that is willing to swallow them and let them on a train. Swaying with every bend of the carriage, Madeleine discovers she is floating outside of her body, as though she is contained in the reflection behind the empty seat staring back at her. The version of herself in the window thinks someone ought to notice the soot and dirt on James. The bruises forming on her. No one does.

Three am finally finds them at the door to James’ flat. The entire street is decked out in the mirrored chalk façades of white Notting Hill with a long litany of blackened windows curling around the bend of Stanley Crescent. The world they’re awake in is different to that of all the people still soundly asleep in their banker’s beds.

“Make yourself comfortable,” James says, gesturing at the bare bones of his flat. It looks about as inviting as all her hiding places over the years and Madeleine knows better than to ask if he’s just moved in.

He steals away into the kitchen while she takes her coat off and pulls her hair up, trying to shed the tattered skin of someone who’s had a close encounter with death thrice over in the week. “Scotch?” James asks, fractionally domesticated in the same way she is - barefoot with the sleeves of his turtleneck shoved up to his elbows.

Normally, she would say no. Normally, she would tell someone like him that drinking is not a solution. Tonight, she takes a glass from him and clinks it against the other one in his hand.

“Cheers,” James mutters drily and knocks half his double back.

She is not quite so eager, doesn’t have a decade’s habitual abuse under her belt, and only sips at the drink. It dribbles down her throat like fire anyway, violent. Madeleine can feel her cheeks flush with it.

The last time she had a drink was on the train journey through an expanse of desert so vast it was like being on a ship far out at sea. She remembers watching the dunes - incomprehensible, seemingly unmoving waves slowly brushed around by the silent winds -  in the afternoon she spent alone in their cabin. Everything had seemed so surreal then. Her whole life had uprooted itself out of the cold safety of the Hoffler Klinik. Suddenly she was sweating bullets in Tangier, flitting through a thousand childhood memories in the restless dreams at L’Americain. The train was even worse, but somehow she slipped into that gown of liquid silk, dipped her lips in crimson, and put on a good show for dinner. _A martini couldn’t be such a dirty idea_ , she’d thought at the time.

Of course, even the one sip she’d had had felt hideous in her stomach when the table went flying and her head swam with the sound of gunshots overhead. Everything about that had been hurried, close quarter destruction, panels and bar tops and partitions smashing like cheap chipboard. She’s lost several chunks of that night to a concussion, but the strangling taste of her heartbeat on her tongue remains.

She inches closer to James, glasses discarded, her eyes searching for the same earnest animal she saw in him then. It’s a dangerous thing, she knows, to let him kiss the terror from her and twist it into something else entirely. Her throat works around itself, her fingers tracing the curves of his bicep. James stands stock still, but his eyes flit over her face, searching.

Madeleine doesn’t close her eyes when she kisses him, suddenly painstakingly afraid of the dark even though she can’t see a thing this close to his face. James catches her lower lip between his, his teeth grazing brutally - not quite enough to draw blood - as his hands finally come to life. It’s only a half fevered grope, like something that’s part brain and part heart, nothing close to the adrenaline fueled encounter that pushed her halfway up a cabin dresser on the train. Only that is exactly what she’s looking for: something to take her mind out of itself, so she can ignore the smell of explosives clinging to their skin and escape the notion that they’ve almost died four times in twelve short days.

In the back of her mind, the thought persists. James’ hand under her shirt is so warm she breaks out in gooseflesh, the chill of having been out still woven deep into her skin. His fingers curl where they rest, his thumb curving around the bend of her hipbone without a word, without a pause in their breathless drag of a kiss, and Madeleine knows how this plays out. Or, she thinks she does, because, when he pulls away to look at her, it isn’t the same as before. His gaze isn’t distracted with lust, but bores right into her, and the way his lips purse makes her heart put up another fight.

He says, “Madeleine,” looking for permission that gets caught in the confines of her rapidly closing throat. She tries for a single word, but even the thought of it slices her clean like a knife, and her eyes water precariously.

Maybe this isn’t the right thing to do after all. By her logic, a repeat of the train would be the solution, but then he’s the one with experience in the field and the situation is so very different. He’s not meant to be kind and they are not meant to go slow.

She bursts into tears in the theatrical way she’s avoided for years, always holed away and spilling over by the barest measure possible, but this time she’s bawling. For an instant, she thinks she’s turned into her mother, finally crumbling after a long screaming match downstairs, but James is not her father and he’s done everything right by her so far. There’s an ugly sort of wounded sound clawing its way out of her and his whiskey breath moves close to her ear, saying, “Hey, it’s all over now.”

Out of all the people to be held, Madeleine is certainly not the easiest. She sucks in one shuddering breath and consciously melts, shoulder blades drifting apart so she can clamp her arms around his chest and squeeze for comfort.

“It’s over, at last,” he murmurs.

James Bond, in her arms, is an unassuming brute - a guard dog softening in the glow of a fireplace retirement - and the bulk of him gives to the push and pull of a dedicated pair of hands without protest. Her hand finds the back of his head dropping into the crook of her neck, her tears streaking the side of his face before his seep through her shirt. So, he’s been muzzled and she declawed; they’re not any worse off for it. 

 

* * *

 

If Madeleine Swann has learned anything from her father, it is that life cannot be severed easily. It’s the third day after the national security of several nations has been compromised to the very core when she allows herself to examine the damage she’s sustained. In the white glow of the bathroom, the bruises etched into the corners of her mouth create a dark smile. She prods at the skin with repulsed interest, echoes of pain discarded in favour of mapping out the yellowing borders that look like something gone off. She can almost taste the rag in her mouth.

Along her wrists and ankles, smatters of fresh bruises. The ones from the train - large lagoons that protest when she leans on them - have turned green. James looks much the same. They’ve taken to sleeping strangely twisted, each accommodating their own injuries with only an arm or a leg touching the other, and Madeleine wonders how he has done this for years: always working around a body demanding attention.

During the day, he appears almost unaffected by it, restless to move even. It drives James out of the flat at sunrise, so she takes her coffee alone, curled up in the living room on the cool leather sofa with a t-shirt of his drawn over her knees. By the time he comes back, she has caught up with the day and they live with fragile ease that expires only hours later, because at night, James is wounded to the core, all the things he’s done spilling out of him, twenty years of confessionals passing between them.

 

* * *

 

The following Monday, her bubble finally bursts. Madeleine wakes up to find the flat empty and a nameless stiff paper bag that screams ‘money’ sitting on the sofa in her spot. Curiosity outweighs her craving for coffee, so she unties the silken bow at the top to reveal a carefully folded selection of clothing in a variety of inoffensive shades. The first thing she pulls out is a knit she is mostly sure is cashmere, not that she can find a label on it beyond an obscure, neat brand. There are two more shirts, a pair of jeans, and a skirt made from a type of wool blend so soft she wants to bury herself in it. At the very bottom, a pair of tights and an envelope that seems to double as a letter.

Madeleine recognises James’ stocky handwriting on the back, the words ‘ _am at interview with MI6 today_ ’ written in two straight lines with the implied ‘ _they’ll want to talk to you too_ ’ kindly left out. Inside, he’s left her an anonymous credit card with the PIN code etched onto a post-it note.

It is, unequivocally, the most subtly outrageous thing anyone has ever done for her.

She doesn’t intend to accept it, at first, but dressed in something that isn’t James’ sweatpants, keeping the world at bay for any longer seems like too much of an effort, so she takes the card, his longest scarf to wrap herself in - a discordant maroon that clashes with her jacket but mercifully covers up the bruises - and clenches her hands into fists in his gloves to keep them from slipping off.

She is a stranger to London in the way she hasn’t been to a city since Paris, veritably hidden in the pulsing flow of people keeping a metropolitan alive. This is not the Austrian alps, nor is it humid heat of Paraguay. She no longer wears the mask of her profession as a disguise and it leaves her dizzy to be free like this.

Blurring the telltale signs of violence from her face with an array of makeup in a grimy toilet cubicle, Madeleine stares into her own eyes in the mirror and wonders if this is what it means to be reborn. She could smile at someone without asking them a predetermined question on a form.

The thought is so foreign, she wants to run away as soon as she tries it. She ends up wandering up and down the same department store for another three hours all the same, scraping together a small closet and five shades of red lipstick for the thrill of it. It’s the sort of thing little girls dream of, at least ones without an absent father that teaches them about guns years before they perfect their cursive at school. Still, she intends to pay James back every penny of it as soon as she gets a hold of her bank accounts somehow.

That is, until she catches a glimpse of Harrods glittering golden in the dark that’s fallen without her noticing, and Madeleine makes a single, ill fated, dizzyingly pricey detour. Valentino lures her into a maze of designer gowns so lush she doesn’t dare let her eyes linger, and yet cannot tear them away. Not a single thing has a visible price tag and her longing only doubles with all the imagined numbers.

She doesn’t know if the card has a limit, but she suspects, by the sleek black plastic that hasn’t seen a day’s use, she can take up a bill as high as she pleases. Her fingers trace the backs of flashy gowns that make her giddy with excitement for all the possibilities in life, sparkling with the mirth of all the things she’s never been allowed. If James could see her now, Madeleine thinks, he would know the sacrifices have been worth it.

 

* * *

 

“Doctor Swann,” the man she knows simply as M says, “it’s a pleasure to meet you again and under better, less urgent circumstances this time.” He wears the appeasing smile of a politician, but it’s entirely charmless on him.

“You mean now that the world is not ending,” Madeleine counters.

His smile twitches into something much more authentic for a moment before it disappears. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches the amused clench of James’ jaw and knows she’s on the right track.

M says: “Well, things are far from resolved, as you can imagine.”

“At least you do not have the debacle of a public execution on your hands. The mess that would have made…” It’s not something she has brought up in private with James thus far and the tension of that night suddenly coalesces between them, so that he falls a step behind her and M before he catches up again.

Unaware of their private affairs, M says, “I understand we have you to thank for that, in part.”

So he does roundabout approaches too. Madeleine inclines her head. “That is not why MI6 wants to talk to me though, is it?”

“No. SPECTRE has done a lot of damage, both in the long term - not yet something that can be assessed properly - but most importantly in the very days we are living now. The… incident, as far as London is concerned, has shaken the trust the British public and many nations worldwide have in the competence of modern day intelligence services. As a result, a wide reaching inquest has been opened and you are obviously both persons of interest.

“The statements Bond has given over the week so far can’t themselves be thrown into question, but corroboration of events by other witnesses is always desirable. We are looking to debrief you on your involvement in the events of the past three weeks for any details on the organisation, however minute. Blofeld’s capture has undoubtedly affected the organisation’s structure and function, but much of it has yet to be taken down and several branches are expected to go rogue.”

“I do not know much of SPECTRE’s internal politics, I’m afraid,” she says, apologizing for something she isn’t the slightest bit sorry for. What she has touched upon in her lifetime, can only have been the very fringes, and that has already been more than she ever wanted to encounter. With any luck, she will never brush up against it again. Madeleine glances back at James, following them so quietly he may as well have disappeared. She thinks of hugging him on the bridge, a whispered ‘ _thank you_ ’ echoing in her mind. She comes to herself again realising M is already in the middle of his next speech.

“-because of your father. L’Americain, for instance, was a clue you did not know you held. There may well be more such places, or information pointing towards yet unknown co-conspirators, anything.”

Madeleine nearly corrects his last word to ‘members’, but bites her tongue, thinking of the man she shot when she was nine. What she does say is: “You want me to dissect my childhood, so you can tear the walls out of every shack my family spent our holidays in in the hopes of finding something you don’t even know you’re looking for?”

M grimaces. “I wouldn’t put it like that-”

“Don’t worry,” Madeleine interjects, “I have no objections. All I ask is that you please return any family photos he may have pinned to the walls to me. Oh, and please do not harass my mother; he never confided in her. Is that a deal you can make?”

She asks it with the genuine interest but none of the desperation of a petty criminal, and M nods. Strangely enough, she feels like she has already won even though she has yet to enter the interview room.

 

* * *

 

Their nights are far longer than they ought to be, filled with hours and hours of chatter until their throats are raw. James pours the first two drinks on the counter with a degree of civility before the wine bottle migrates to the kitchen floor, or the sofa, or wherever they’ve decided to have their existential talks. Between dissecting every detail about SPECTRE they know between the two of them and recounting their official statements of the day after spending hours giving them, their lives seem like nothing more than an extension of  the inquest. At times, Madeleine just lies there, half drunk, sick of it all, and contemplates telling everyone to fuck off.

They stay up until two, three, four with insomnia, but when they finally curl into one another, blood buzzing hypnotizingly in her veins, Madeleine falls into a dead, dreamless sleep and doesn’t second guess the body beside her.

By morning the sluggish weight that pulls her under is no longer pleasant. It throbs in her head as she swipes concealer under her eyes in the glare of the bathroom lights. Coming into the kitchen for a cup of coffee that makes her insides jitter and her mind clear, Madeleine says: “We have to stop drinking so much.”

James, who looks as unaffected by their nightly intoxication as always, merely says, “Only after this is over,” and offers her a plate of plain toast.

She gives him a dubious look, because he’s probably had a drink on more nights than not over the past twenty years and she doesn’t have the patience to counsel him. Most of it appears to be attributable to work related stress though, and she can’t fault him with the way she has taken to drinking too lately. She recalls scratching ‘ _suspected alcoholism’_ onto his form in the Hoffler Klinik and wonders if that is going to become a problem.

James must get the message whether she’s going to say it out loud or not, because he crowds her up against the kitchen counter, one hand tucking away her hair, and says, “Look, I know it’s an issue. Mealtime drinks only after the inquest, I promise.”

“Thank you.”

“And I’m sure we can make an exception for a glass of wine in the bath, if that’s something you like.”

“Do you?”

“It is only the _peak_ of nihilism.”

She rolls her eyes, but can’t suppress a smile or stop herself from rising onto her toes and pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

 

* * *

 

Talks of SPECTRE start to fizzle over the next two weeks, their combined intel falling short as the inquest progresses and their involvement in it fades. For a few days, the reinstatement of a separate MI6 and MI5 with a sanctioned budget high enough to restore them to their glory days is news, morsels of rumors and agency chatter carrying down through Miss Moneypenny and Tanner and a very sarcastic call from Q asking for his watch back.

“Right now, M could probably feed the PM his hat if he pleased. Not even a whisper implying incompetence, and that from a woman who has hung onto the hearing on the Vauxhall attack for two bloody years,” Eve says over a lunch James recounts that night over dinner.

“Things are well then? Relatively, I mean,” Madeleine asks.

James shrugs. “Well, M certainly has a lot more power and freedom than he did before, but it’s associated with a lot of risks. It’s a politically torrid situation and he has to strike a careful balance between the internal and external conflicts tearing at the core of national security, which is tricky enough _without_ your superiors attempting to con you out of a job non-stop. In the public eye, the rogue fraction of MI6 are heroes, but in the world of bureaucratic accountability, it’s the type of insubordination that makes life one bloody catch twenty-two after another.”

He nurses his scotch with a somber look and it occurs to Madeleine this must be precisely the sort of escapades he’s built most of his career on - being too good to be put down, but being constantly sent to the dog house to atone and chewing through his chains instead, only getting himself into more trouble along the way. Oddly enough, in some way, him spiraling saved her.

Given, that was and continues to be a complicated affair, what with the way they’re shacked up together with nowhere to go and all of their lives still ahead of them, splayed open with a thousand possibilities that she isn’t quite sure she’ll take. James is, in his most primeval and vulnerable form, a simple man, whom she does not dare complicate.

For now, they are homemade lasagna and slow sex, a grey Saturday morning slipping into bed with them afterwards where the light from the window slides across the floor. James tells bad jokes as they skulk around parks made for ordinary couples who haven’t shot people and gutted guns blindfolded and Madeleine’s laugh still sounds a little off, not quite used to the sound of of her happiness yet.

 

* * *

 

Her bruises fade in a series of sickly colour transitions over many weeks. Cuts scab and scar, leaving strings of red rings around her wrists. By all accounts she is healing, and yet the world caves in on itself every so often and puts her right back at the beginning.

“We found one of your father’s bases in St Tropez,” M tells her on the Tuesday three weeks into the inquest. He looks marginally pleased, or perhaps the palette of his facial expressions is so subdued, she ought to count his reaction as thrilled. Madeleine merely feels nauseous.

She had loved St Tropez ardently as a child. Some of her first memories are of their bright summer months by the coast: of molten ice cream tracked halfway to her elbow, her bathing suit the colour of the ocean as she’d run to her mother with a shell she found in the sand. She suddenly wonders if the picture of her sat on his shoulders having exchanged their sun hats is stuck somewhere to the inside of a dusty old room like the one in Tangier, but can’t bring herself to _ask_. She’s looked for the photograph in the family albums for years - her barely catching a glimpse of the camera from under his camouflage snapback while she pushed her own powder white, flower adorned bucket hat down on his head with fierce determination - to come up with nothing.

She isn’t sure how much time has passed when she finally asks, “Is it possible to postpone any further interviews until tomorrow?” Her voice sounds disconnected, like it’s coming from a much more reasonable, rational version of the child within crumbling under a life of lies unraveling years later.

M’s face twitches, his eyebrows inching together into some severe expression she can’t read before it smooths out again. “Of course,” he says, even and polite.

Maybe she nods, maybe she doesn’t. Whatever he says next flies over her head, because the next thing Madeleine registers is James, ever hovering by her side on guard, answering M with a dry, “Yes, please.”

The heat of his hand pooling at the small of her back grounds her in the moment, far away from the naive - _happy_ , her mind supplies unkindly - creature she used to be. It’s a destructive thing, retroactive sadness.

 

* * *

 

“I want to show you something,” James tells her that afternoon, carrying the sort of brown box people keep confidential files in. “About Franz.”

“Blofeld?”

“Yes.”

He’s clearly strung tight and oddly enough it makes James look like a schoolboy going to confessionals.

Madeleine says: “All right.”

And that’s how things start to come undone: two tired kids taking each other on a tour of their wonky family trees. James shows her the singed and yellowed documents from his childhood home, tells her about his parents, the guardianship, Skyfall turning to rubble many years later. The single photograph in the box is of Oberhauser senior with a young James and Franz stood to either side of him. Even in the artifact, Blofeld is a ghost, face turned to smoke in a bygone fire. The photo reminds her of the framed picture of her and her father set up on the mantelpiece in the Kartenhoff crater, the same sepia, totally unaware of where life was going to take them.

She says as much to James, reliving St Tropez through non-chronological snippets of memories for him. It paints a clear enough picture for someone who is used to wringing information out of people in incoherent drivels. She tells him of university, the many years and ways she avoided her father, always keenly aware of just how close an eye he kept on her no matter how far away she tried to push him, that he was never more than two steps behind her and occasionally one ahead.

“I hate him for how his choices have inadvertently hounded me,” Madeleine says.

“He always came to your rescue though, did he not?”

“Yes,” she agrees, “but it should never have come to that.”

For all the ways her father has united them, in this respect, they are at a discord, even if James doesn’t provoke her. His loneliness is a chronic condition, unlike hers. It’s a consequence of being an orphan, almost bred into him at this point. She gets the feeling whoever recruited him into MI6 was keen on keeping him afloat, but in the end, he was, by definition, on his own. His messes, partially born from the trail of classified dossiers on the floor, have always been his own, and, where Madeleine comes from, holding the gun is preferable to getting caught in the crossfire.

“What if my past amounts to something destructive, too, one day?” James asks her.

She can see from the way his face filters through three different emotions at once that he’s never had to ask himself that question before. He’s a man of situational assurances and razor sharp shards of disillusionment. He must have told other women two sets of stories with equal conviction - we’ll never make it; I’ll keep you safe - but perhaps he has never asked before.

_I’ve never wanted to be with anyone unconditionally in the face of all the hypotheticals before_ , his eyes say and she rests two delicate fingers against the edge of his jaw as she says: “Then it does.”

It’s neither a verdict nor a commitment, but it satisfies him for the moment. Madeleine, on the other hand, grapples with a sudden, chilling void of uncertainty expanding demandingly in the pit of her stomach. Fifteen years she has sworn up and down to avoid men with blood stained pasts, and here she is, offering one her life on a platter.

She imagines it’s human nature, to a degree: Meeting something utterly feral in a clearing and wanting to touch it, tame it. It seems simple enough when you’re ten feet apart, half exhilarated and half terrified, eyes locked in a temporary truce, but she’s gotten far too close for comfort now and she can smell the blood on him. Girls that go around petting wolves don’t make it out of the woods, yet here she is with one hand fisted in James’ hair and the other tugging at his shirt.

 

* * *

 

As far as the inquest goes, Madeleine becomes near obsolete within a month, all avenues of her repressed memories thoroughly desecrated. She is not naive enough to believe in clear cut lines between heroes and villains, particularly when they’re both politically affiliated giants of a thousand heads, but she likes to believe she’s contributing towards some form of a greater good.

James, she thinks, might simply be evening out the books. He spends office hours poring over boxes upon boxes of files relating to old missions while she’s been cleared to roam every tourist attraction in London for all MI6 cares.

“We made it to the end of 1998 today,” James says, voice raised enough to carry from the foyer to the kitchen where Madeleine is setting the plates around the island.

“How long do you think this will drag on?” she asks.

“The inquest? At this rate, maybe six weeks.” He creeps around, sock footed, loosening his tie and shrugging off his coat. “Why?”

“Merely curious. I’ve been looking at jobs,” Madeleine confesses. She pours two glasses of port to work up the courage to add, “In Paris.”

If he feels any sort of way about that, it doesn’t show. His surprise is elegantly noncommittal, the raise of an eyebrow accompanied by a curious, “Oh?”

It leaves Madeleine filling the silence, explaining, “London is not the right place for me, at least not permanently. I’m not setting an ultimatum for you, but it _is_ an option I am considering and you should know that. I understand England is your home as much as France is mine, and so you will understand I long to return.”

“I’m not nearly as attached to Queen and country as you may believe,” James says. It’s not a promise exactly, but he doesn’t veto the idea either, and she gives that some weight of its own.

The true meaning of his statement doesn’t filter through until three days later when she’s breaking her head over her CV for the umpteenth time. Being practically abducted from the Hoffler Klinik and disappearing to resurface in England won’t land her a good reference, though it’s the least of her worries. They will have filed a police report of the incident that she won’t be able to resolve without a hassle. Then there’s the matter of the fact she’s lived under a false identity for four years, and while Médecins Sans Frontières hadn’t been too picky, the institutions she’s looking at now have rigorous background checks she cannot pass with a flimsy fake passport and half a CV.

That is, until she receives an e-mail titled ‘a favour’ from an address comprised of a random string of letters and numbers. It simply reads: _Bond sends his love. Not a direct quote. -Q_. Her cheeks grow hot reading the words and she hastily moves to click on the attachments - a neat CV and documents to verify each employment under the name Swann. Madeleine is still scanning through the files in disbelief when a second message pops up.

> _French authorities were looking for a Mlle M. Toussard in connection to the recent_ _death of her father, Christian White. I took the liberty of fixing that, but advise you_ _check up on e.g. lawyers or notaries he may have been in contact with._
> 
> _-Q_
> 
> _P.s. Please send appropriate photograph to use on official documentation; the one_ _attached to your file is rather... blue in the face._

‘ _Her_ father’ it says instead of ‘ _your_ father’ and she takes that to mean Madeleine Toussard is dead in the eyes of the law. It is probably for the best, she knows that, but there’s a final surge of bitterness at having to relinquish even the last shreds of her past for her father’s sake. It isn’t as though she could ever have slipped back into that life, but there was a comfort in knowing her old self was simply on hold, waiting for a better day to come. In retrospect, she should have expected a better day could only follow a severance; Madeleine just didn’t expect it to be a severance from herself.

And perhaps she’s lost something - twenty-seven years of her life, more like - but somehow she’s regained her freedom in the process. She wishes it wouldn’t have cost her father his life, even if it is a sacrifice he chose to make. Even if she hated him for years and years. Somewhere deep down she’s always believed in redemption arcs, in love as the ultimate motivator. It occurs to her that maybe she couldn’t save her father because she was meant to save James instead, and he her.

 

* * *

 

Madeleine isn’t sure how things take such a drastic turn from there, but two days later her voice climbs several octaves, spitting rapid fire expletives at James’ head. Maybe she’s still raw from her own death or maybe her father’s has resurfaced to haunt her; all she knows is the anger she’s kept simmering in her bones for years is clawing itself out of her body faster than she can hope to reel it back in.

“Don’t pretend to be stupid,” she hisses, getting a chokehold on the fury that strips her voice of volume but not of venom.

James, annoyed, says, “You knew they’d want everything.” It comes out as an accusation and her teeth shift with the effort of keeping her hands by her side instead of bruising him.

“I’m not an idiot. What they want and what you give them are not the same thing. Don’t insinuate otherwise for even one moment. We both know you don’t play by the rules, so don’t try to turn this around on me with a moral high ground you don’t have.”

Somewhere around the argument, they’re still trying to set up dinner. Or rather, James is, pointedly not looking at her. Madeleine can pick out the tension in the stiff line of his shoulders, though he tries to sound calm when he says: “I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”

“Because I wanted to avoid dragging my mother into this at all costs, yet here you are doing exactly that!” Madeleine screams at him and the plate in her hand goes flying on its own accord. It shatters on the cabinet above the stove, narrowly missing his head, perhaps because James practically has another set of eyes in the back of his head and manages to instinctively swerve out of the way.

For a moment, she’s moved by a wave of guilt, the word ‘sorry’ already on her lips when he turns around to fling the oven mittens on the ground. Presumably he’s going to yell at her, judging by the way his jaw is clamped down on the fringes of his explosive anger, and it reminds her so much of her father whenever he insisted she was being unnecessarily difficult over an offence _he_ committed.  It’s enough for Madeleine’s remorse to stutter, hands closing around a glass.

She flings it just past his head, the water tumbling out of it on the way. “I hate you!” she yells, because it comes naturally, and the second glass on the table goes too.

That one, James catches mid air, fury doubled and muted at once. She recognises the bland expression from the train and effortlessly smashed plywood walls come to mind with the drop in her gut. It’s so easy for her to forget sometimes that he’s got an off switch, charming blue eyes dead at a moment’s notice. There’s no question he’s dangerous when he’s staring her down like this. Madeleine can hear her blood roar in her ears.

It seems to take an eternity for him to move, but, when he does, it’s an evasive maneuver, stepping closer to the counter to set the glass back down and away from her. “I didn’t know,” James says simply.

He looks painfully human stepping out of his anger, the killer within retreating silently into its cave. All that remains is a man in a half soaked shirt. Madeleine lets her head tip back against the fridge as James stalks off to the bedroom. How did she ever let it come to this?

She feels five again, all her anger trapped in a too small container. She’s supposed to have better self-control by now. The thought of what she’s just done, how she lost control of herself, pricks hot behind closed eyes. He isn’t the only one to have come out of this broken; Madeleine has her own lifetime of issues.

Sometimes she can be gravely in the wrong too. She swallows her pride and wipes at the corners of eyes. Knocking hesitantly on the bedroom door, she says, “James.” It comes out like a question, her hand resting on the handle for a moment waiting for a sign that she is not welcome. In their world, silence is its own kind of invitation.

Madeleine slips inside and, surprised to find the room dark, regroups, hovering by the door until her eyes adjust. Even then she can only see James in the broadest of lines, a shadow against the bedspread.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I should not have lashed out at you like that.”

“No, you had a point. I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss it.”

His voice is gruff and Madeleine wishes she could look into his eyes and search for the words he has yet to find. It appears today they both have to be blind.

“So, we both behaved regrettably,” she says, just to keep the conversation going as she crosses the room in three strides. In the dark, she can’t be certain, but she thinks she can feel James’ eyes on her. At the very least, his hand reaches for hers. “Where does that leave us?”

“I don’t know,” James says, “What would normal people do?”

“Let it pile up and get a divorce,” Madeleine says without thinking, the image of her parents coming to mind as soon as the words leave her.

“I meant _happy_ couples.” He lingers on the word like it’s foreign and he isn’t sure if he’s pronouncing it correctly.

It’s such a ridiculous notion, she sits down beside him and pulls his hand into her lap. “They talk.” She runs a finger around the edges of his callouses. “Presumably.”

“We’re not particularly good at that, are we?”

“Not this kind of talking, no,” Madeleine agrees. “Do you understand why I’m upset?”

“Not well enough to sympathise. You don’t talk about your mother much.”

She could argue he doesn’t either, but James doesn’t have as many memories of his parents to begin with and they’re not all for her to know. She’d like to keep a tighter hold on hers too, but they’ve got to meet somewhere, so she says, “It’s different, when they’re alive. You don’t like talking about your parents to strangers because you think they’ll think they know you. I know the feeling. I kept my father bottled up until he died and now he’s gradually slipping. I am so much more than what he made me, but how could anyone have understood that? You and I, we live our lives on the edge of tragedy. It’s our next door neighbour. These things are ordinary for us, and still we don’t know how to speak about them, because other people didn’t understand when we tried. My mother, in many ways, is one of them. She is who I should’ve been, who I wish I’d turned out like.

“Look at what I’ve become instead. When I was little, she fought so hard to keep me out of this dark place Papa had obviously slipped into and for twenty-seven years, it worked. Do you know why I’m so angry at my father? He was weak, carried that photograph of the two of us in his wallet, never thinking what sort of danger that put me in. He was too selfish to divorce himself from me and I don’t want to make that mistake with my mother. I love her deeply and she loves me, but we cannot coexist safely. The things I say about her matter in a way anecdotes about my father do not. She is out there somewhere, waiting to feel the ripple of the consequences of my actions, and that scares me. _Your_ recklessness scares me; it lived inside my father and I’ve seen what it does to people.

“I don’t want to lose another person to its wilderness,” Madeleine say quietly, caressing James’ cheek with her free hand.

He turns his head toward the touch, achingly pliant, though his hand tightens on hers. “It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten what it is like to have family. If I did, I imagine I’d feel much the same as you do, so I’m sorry. I’ll see if I can get her stricken off the record.”

“You don’t have to do that. Rationally speaking, I know it isn’t that big an issue, but it is something I’m particularly sensitive to. What you said won’t get my mother in trouble and I’d rather you don’t violate any rules.” Madeleine adds, “Just don’t do it again.”

He nods and Madeleine presses a brief kiss to his lips before she says, “I think the lasagne is burning,” their lives returning to ordinary matters.

 

* * *

 

 

The call is wholly unexpected and comes on a sunny Tuesday afternoon when Madeleine has divorced herself from the smatter of green patches in Notting Hill and Kensington Gardens to drift along the Thames on a river bus, enjoying herself in the pulsing bleakness of London.  

The number is unknown, but the speaker is not. “Good afternoon. This is Eve Moneypenny calling on behalf of Universal Exports about a product complaint placed by a Doctor Swann,” Moneypenny rattles off in the tone of  a well polished commercial speech that has Madeleine fall into the clutches of the charade for a moment, replying with something that reeks of both phone sale anxiety and recognition.

Moneypenny, suddenly alive in her own witty voice, replies with a relieved, “Oh, it _is_ you. Fantastic, we can drop the act then.”

Momentarily the change is overwhelming, Madeleine’s train of thought completely derailed. She wonders briefly how often a day Moneypenny is paid to say that line, perfected down to the short pause toward the end, as though she actually reading a name off a list, and what it might be like to make it to the end of a false exchange complete with excellently faked apologies for the disturbance. As a civilian, it is the only call she should be getting.

Instead, Moneypenny says, “I’m trying to plan James’ retirement party,” so casually it implies Madeleine not only ought to know about it, but that they’ve gone over it twelve times in the past. “I’m afraid there are some things no one, and I do mean _no one_ , in the service can accomplish in regards to James and a little help would be welcome and much appreciated.”

“From me?” Madeleine asks, to clarify, because she is meant to be a completely separate faction of James’ life to the Service.

“Yes, you. He’s a dreadfully asocial being and there is no way to get him to come out without good reason, especially after the incident at the Christmas party four years ago.”

She does not even want to know and so opts for the second most obvious question: “You want me to act as bait?” It rings several alarm bells in her head, mostly to do with orange wires and the suffocating feeling of woolen darkness. “Why?”

“You do know he has no social life outside of you, right?”

It sounds like an insult and a compliment at once. Madeleine is still too stunned to say anything, eyes transfixed on the people on the shore flitting past one another, all in a hurry to commute somewhere where their lives might pick up again.

Moneypenny continues, “Besides, everyone is incredibly excited; we haven’t had a peaceful, old-school retirement for a double-oh agent in thirteen years, and the bar is already booked full with attendees. James seemed the least likely of the lot to pull this kind of stunt on us - not the running off to god knows where and unearthing a global crisis, but the meeting someone to settle down with thing - at least not for a _second_ time.”

It seems jarring to Madeleine to gloss over Vesper Lynd like that, but perhaps briskness is considered polite in a business where the dead undoubtedly resurface more often than anyone is comfortable with. James had talked about her for hours, through an entire night.

“I wasn’t with the Service back then, but I hear the office never got to organise anything the first time around, that he just ran away like a petulant child,” Moneypenny says and Madeleine almost corrects her with a tight: “Sailed off.”

The thing is, she can see why he did that. The process of weaving in loose ends with MI6 is a bureaucratic nightmare that drags on for weeks and months without pause. She supposes James has learned from his mistakes, that he needs to pore over it all this time to make sure there isn’t another man like her father or Blofeld out there to unravel him again.

At the other end of the line, Moneypenny is still speaking. “It’s quite a feat, on your part. You wouldn’t believe the sheer amount of women in the office that are a little green with the notion that someone has managed to tame him.”

_She sounds like she’s talking about a lion_ , Madeleine thinks.

Moneypenny says, “In James’ book six - seven? - weeks is like being married for a decade.”

“Is that supposed to be comforting?” Madeleine asks, suddenly irritated.

“Not at all. What I’m saying is that he likes you more than anybody I know. In fact, I wasn’t even entirely certain whether he was capable of non-situational attachment until now. Although, don’t tell him I said that. Anyway, the party is set for next Thursday at a gorgeous little place a few blocks from the new quarters.”

“I don’t know. James detests surprises.”

“Don’t worry, it won’t be a big ambush with three dozen screamers. We know better than to try that on a field agent. It will be a simple, very English night, although it’s at a bar instead of a pub, because the bloody sod has developed a taste for mixed spirits over beer.” Moneypenny draws a breath and her voice softens by several degrees when she says, “You know, we would all love to meet you properly after that hassle last time. Don’t let James trick you into thinking we’re all heartless; secretly even Q, who’s probably never been optimistic about anything that isn’t a promising new blend of tea, is happy for the both of you. It’ll be three hours tops, I promise - just some embarrassing stories transfused with free alcohol.”

Her voice rises hopefully at the end, pleading without actually saying anything to that effect.

“All right,” Madeleine says. Perhaps it’s the conspiratorial mirth that gets to her, the distinct feeling of speaking to a friend - something she hasn’t had in years - not that Moneypenny is her friend, exactly, or James’ for that matter, at least not in the traditional sense. Then again, there is nothing remotely traditional about any of them to begin with.

Moneypenny says, “I’ll send you the address.”

 

* * *

 

 

The party is exactly what Moneypenny promised. Madeleine manages to lure James there under the guise of dinner, hanging superfluously from his right arm as he catalogues familiar faces and comes to the conclusion this is no coincidence.

“What is this?” James finally asks, brow knotted in confusion, though he remains relaxed otherwise.

“They wanted to throw you a retirement party,” Madeleine explains and adds, “Moneypenny tells me it is quite an important event.”

“And you helped?”

She shakes her head. “I was bait.”

Something funny happens to his face then, a startled look of inordinate fondness bleeding into the usual, rough lines. The intensity in his eyes is almost frightening, a megawatt supply of emotion wavering bright. Madeleine wants to stop time and suss out every millimeter of that expression - certain it carries enormous weight - but she can scarcely commit the bare bones of it to memory before Bill Tanner barges in on their moment with two drinks in hand.

“You made it,” he says, handing Bond a martini glass, “Shaken not stirred. The bartender gave me a look like you wouldn’t believe. Eve is having a field day with this whole thing, probably because no one thought you’d show up. She’s cashing in fivers over there just now.” Tanner vaguely inclines his head to one side, where, sure enough, Moneypenny flashes a victorious smile at someone fumbling with their wallet. Eve looks back over at them as if sensing she’s being talked about and gives them a smug royal wave.

“A fiver each? The betting pool sure has gone downhill,” James mutters drily.

“Well, you were the top underdog. No one else stacks the odds the same. Plus, we had to spring a fair payment for this place, so the disposable income’s out for us lowly second tier office rats,” Tanner complains without real gusto, though James pretends to be wounded. Madeleine can’t even feign understanding.

_Perhaps they all deal in insults and micro expressions_ , she thinks, trying to revive the social networking smile she developed years ago, an agonising two hours spent in front of the bathroom mirror to get a foot in the door with Sorbonne’s most notorious professor. It must still work, because Tanner turns to her with an expression she assumes is meant to be apologetic.

“Sorry, very rude of me to natter on like this. I wasn’t sure what sort of drink you might like, so I opted for a safe choice. Hopefully apple cider is okay.”

It’s the weirdest peace offering she’s ever gotten: a wet glass filled to the brim with cider and she spills a bit of it taking it from him. “Er, thank you,” Madeleine says, holding the pint uncertainly.

Tanner nods at her and shifts his weight as if to signal he’s come to the end of their interaction and is trying to come up with a way to leave. Madeleine has the odd impulse to shake his hand and say, “It was a pleasure to meet you,” but can’t quite manage it because it sounds awkward even in her own head.

“Oh,” Tanner says to her, finding a lifeline, “I don’t know if this is the right time, but I don’t know when we might meet again.” He digs something out of his pocket and offers, what appears to be a silver ring, up on his palm. “This was released from your father’s personal effects. It’s no use according to Q and he thought you should have it, since it’s one of the few things not going into evidence for the next decade.”

She almost argues her father didn’t wear a wedding ring, until she picks it up, sees the octopus facing her upside down, and realises what it is. It makes her mouth run dry with the memories of the video from Altaussee, James and her father sat on opposite sides of a table, separated only by that ring and later the gun.

Sensing her distress, James chimes in with a firm, “I can take that for you.” He makes makes the ring disappear in the pocket of his suit like a magician and Madeleine is slowly remembering how to breathe again. Apparently Tanner considers that a dismissal, because he floats off before she can even attempt to fake gratitude, leaving her and James adrift by themselves again.

“Are you all right?” James asks in a concerned rumble that barely even travels a foot, his hand coming to rest in the centre of her back.

Madeleine leans into the touch and takes a deep breath. “Yes. Only… I did not realise this would be so suffocating.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No, it’s fine. Everyone is here to celebrate you. We should at least have a few drinks. I assume there is a speech too.”

“Christ,” James mutters, but doesn’t get to the second half of his sentence with Eve Moneypenny swooping in, carrying a drink that looks more like a magic potion than anything remotely alcoholic. The glass is large enough to require the attention of both her hands.

“Oh, look. Our guest of honour made it,” she says whilst somehow not paying any attention to James. “Thank you,” Moneypenny says to Madeleine, “For dragging him here. I told Tanner to get you a drink for compensation, but I see he remains an absolute cocktail virgin. Here, have mine.” She thrusts her hurricane glass at Madeleine and takes the cider away again. “Sex on the beach,” she clarifies.

“And that’s supposed to be better?” James asks, taking a snide sip of his martini. Madeleine swats at him, a horrified look playing out on her face totally unguarded, but Moneypenny only laughs.

“Oh, don’t bother with him. He’s just prickly I made him come out and play nice. If he does become a menace I’ll simply tell the bartender he’s only allowed sherry tonight,” Moneypenny explains to Madeleine in a stage whisper. To James, she says: “It’d be a shame really, especially since M is personally springing for your tab tonight.”

James raises and eyebrow. “Gracious.”

“I know, so be a dear and get me something wetter than this fruit juice,” Moneypenny says, handing the sweating cider off to the fourth person in ten minutes.

James rolls his eyes first, then exchanges a look with Madeleine, a silent question passing between them. She nods, as if to say: _Go. I’ll be fine_.

“Mojito?” he asks and Eve wrinkles her nose.

“I’m not huge on mint, but keep the lime.”

“Daiquiri it is.”

He disappears, all silent grace gliding through the bar, and Madeleine feels exposed standing there alone. She takes a large sip of her cocktail to drown the voice in her head saying _you need him_ over and over again.

If Moneypenny notices how lost she looks, she doesn’t say so. Instead, she mutters something about a table, and Madeleine finds herself being led toward the neon striped back of the room cluttered with a dozen standing tables and ten lipstick stained glasses to each of them. A flock of women vacate one of the tables as they’re approaching, although Madeleine can’t tell whether it’s due to Moneypenny - who, according to James, has become something akin to the Godfather of the mafia that is MI6’s secretarial pool - or the fact that they’re collectively out of alcohol.

“Don’t worry about him,”  Moneypenny says, catching Madeleine scanning the room for James when she doesn’t even know herself it’s what she’s doing. Moneypenny leans in closer to be heard over the various conversations going on around them. “Drinks are in high demand tonight; he’ll be a while.”

And there it is again, that same undercurrent to her words that made Madeleine agree to the party in the first place, something inexplicably familiar she allows herself to trust, so she nods and turns her back to the bar.

“How is the inquest coming along?” she asks, coming up short for anything less formal.

Moneypenny smirks. “Is that the best you’ve got? It’s all paper mountains. I’m sure you know what old archives are like.”

“MI6 isn’t digitised yet?”

“Not fully, no. It’s been a work in progress, which Q has never failed to bitch about, but I doubt it’s a project that will be completed any time soon after the Nine Eyes fiasco. This inquest, however, is so confidential, it only exists in hand written logs. I’ve got a constant wrist ache now,” Moneypenny complains.

“What about tape recorders?”

“Well, that’s what they use in the interviews, as you know, but the transcripts still need to be written out.  Maybe we’ll unearth a real typewriter one of these days to make it all authentic fifties.”

“Dear lord, they used to have one of those at Sorbonne, old blue thing I hated so much I contemplated throwing it out of the window,” Madeleine confesses without thinking, “My supervisor on a research paper was inordinately fond of the thing. If you need someone who could type eighty words a minute several summers ago, I’m at your disposal.” She smiles at Moneypenny - Eve, she’s asked Madeleine to call her, even though James isn’t awarded the courtesy of a first name basis - and it occurs to her it’s the first time she’s had a semblance of a personal moment with anyone other than James in months, maybe even years.

“I couldn’t even begin to guess at my typing speed, but I wager it’s better than Tanner’s with those sausage fingers of his. Trust me, you do not want to try to decipher his late night e-mails,” Eve says, “But then, with how little sleep any of us are getting, I don’t blame him.”

“I’m sorry everything is such a mess.”

Eve waves her hand dismissively. “You shouldn’t be. We would bitch either way. No one’s in the business for a safe nine to five, though we often lie about that even to ourselves. You’re lucky you’re not compelled by the world of espionage. The well rested look really suits you.”

It’s the sort of off-hand remark that reminds Madeleine how dramatically things have changed for her in a few short weeks. Two months ago, she spent her days in an ice palace slowly wilting from sheer boredom. When Eve last saw her in person, not even a month ago, Madeleine was still scuffed and sore in a dozen places and now she doesn’t even recognise herself in the memory of that person anymore.

“Thank you,” Madeleine says. “I feel a lot better too.”

“It shows,“ Eve says.

It’s a moment and a half, fading and passing, the world picking up again around them. James returns with four glasses: Eve’s daiquiri, a new martini for himself, a triple scotch on the rocks, and a glass of champagne he places in front of Madeleine.

“I should shoot you for subjecting me to that hell,” he complains to Eve and downs half his scotch in one go. At the bar, twenty people crowd around the counter, most of them tipsy and unbalanced, a great shrieking mass even twenty feet away. “I got felt up by at least three different people.”

Rolling her eyes, Eve says, “Why do you think I made _you_ go? But, if you must, get on with it. It’s been nearly three years since I shot you, so either settle the score or fuck off. Otherwise you might find me at the end of my patience one of these days, and, let me tell you, my marksmanship has only improved in the home office.” She flashes predatory whites and James responds in kind.

“Wait,” Madeleine says, still playing catch up, eyes darting between the two of them, “did you say you shot him? She _shot you_?”

“Yes,” they say in unison, both disturbingly casual about it. Moneypenny adds: “It isn’t a big deal.”

“I almost drowned.”

“And I got chained to a desk.”

“A favour to everyone, really, in the grand scheme of things.”

“What is?” Q asks, appearing seemingly out of nowhere with a lime capped bottle of beer, squeezing in at the table between Eve and Madeleine, who nearly jumps at his words. He offers her a nervous smile, prodding at his lime, and she thinks of how she can never quite reconcile his mellow voice with the disheveled body he inhabits. He has the intonation of an actor with a neurosis, not a genius.

Eve, who both looks and sounds like she’s got the balls of half a dozen dangerous men lined up under the heel of her stilettos (only because she does) says: “My getting suspended from field work.”

“Are we still harping on about that?”

That appears to offend both parties, which Madeleine isn’t entirely sure isn’t purposeful on Q’s part. For a moment, his lips purse at the corners, like he doesn’t quite know what a smile is, but still possesses the impulse to attempt one before he can push down on it and shove his glasses up along the bridge of his nose.

“They’re like children sometimes, aren’t they?” he asks Madeleine in a quiet sort of sideways reverie, all fond exasperation. Q seems to spend the majority of his personal conversations talking past people that way. “Horribly destructive, very charming, and attractive in a sort of frightening way, but children at heart nevertheless.”

“At least we only _act_ the part,” Eve says flippantly and ignores the dirty look she gets from him. It quickly shifts over to James, who honest to god _snickers_ \- something no man of his stature should be capable of - before he trails into a half hearted cough. It’s such a remarkably petulant exchange, Madeleine briefly considers she might be having a stroke, because she can’t possibly be talking to three adults working at the core of national security.

She’s even more convinced of it when she hears someone rapping on their glass behind her, convinced she’s hearing things until she notices everyone else turning toward the sound and discovers M has found his way to an empty spot in the room with a glass of bourbon and a knife. It kills the party around them just enough, the music turning down while the lights come on and the whole crowd shuffles a bit closer to each other, leaving their table isolated and begging for attention.

“007,” M starts, and James shuffles closer to Madeleine, an arm coming around her waist as M starts what appears to be a slightly buzzed toast. “You’ve been anything but an easy agent to govern and guide, from the very moment I met you in the late M’s office two years ago, but I think I speak for all of us when I say you always get the job done, even if it’s never without a flair for the dramatic.”

A short burst of laughter explodes around them, M pausing and falling back onto his awkward smile. Madeleine looks up to see James smiling too. She will never fully understand this part of his world, but she can let him squeeze her hand and be happy for him.

 

* * *

 

That weekend is slow, shot through with the languid undercurrent of the party. James stays home on the Friday to lie in bed with her until midday, dozing off and having sex in turns until hunger finally drives them up and out of the house.

“Are you going to miss it?” Madeleine asks over a plate of french waffles.

“What, MI6?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Some aspects of it at select moments, maybe,” James says. Contemplating his words, he adds, “It’s my life’s work, always will be, but it’s too destructive an environment to survive in. You’ve seen what that kind of work can do to a man.”

They never speak of her father directly, not in his late years anyway. Some waters are best left uncharted. She’s seen him, suffering in black and white until his last moments; James has witnessed the same shot first hand, full colour and wet with blood.

“I don’t want that to happen to me,” he says.

“Then watch the signs better than the rest of them do. I don’t ever want to leave you, but if you have gone where you should not, I will.”

It is perhaps the most honest things she has ever said to him, cutting in a way she doesn’t intend it to be, but James does not take offence. They come from a world of blurred boundaries and one of them needs to draw a clear line in the sand.

 

* * *

 

 

It is on the next Tuesday evening that Madeleine comes home to James in an hour before he is supposed to be, manhandling a garment bag through the bedroom door.

“What’s all this?” she asks, shirking her gloves. There’s a note taped to the foyer wall reading: _Went to Tesco. -J_. She tears it off and frowns at it, because it’s the sort of domesticated act she can’t reconcile with James even though it’s most certainly his handwriting.

“Oh, I forgot to take that down,” James says on his way back out.

“Did you get milk?”

“Yes. I got the dry cleaning too. Your dress is on top.”

“You sent it to be dry cleaned?” she asks, already drifting into the bedroom to check for herself. She doesn’t hear his reply, and almost asks again when her attention is diverted to something on her nightstand.

It’s her father’s ring, carefully set on top of a flat, black box. James must’ve found it the previous night when he went to drop off his suit, but the box she draws a blank on. It’s velvet with the gold inscription of a jeweller and she is hesitant to open it, but curiosity gets the better of her, and so Madeleine finds herself looking at, what she can only assume, is a diamond necklace worth more than her childhood home.

“James,” she shouts into the other room, “what is this?”

He appears in the doorway, apparently well aware of what she is holding, because he  looks childishly hopeful even as he aims for a casual tone when he says, “It’s just something I thought you might like.”

Madeleine takes a second look at the necklace and he’s right in that respect; it _is_ the sort of thing she would pause at in a window and wonder what it would be like to not only own a necklace like that, but be able to wear it out. _I could find out_ , she thinks. She is free now and the necklace is right there.

“You can’t possibly imagine I would accept this,” she says instead.

“Don’t think about it too hard,” James suggests, inching closer without concern. Maybe he thinks her offence is a front, maybe he’s already accounted for it when he thought of purchasing the necklace. “I want you to have it.”

“Not without good reason, no,” Madeleine says, inviting him to convince her without saying as much. It’s self sabotage, she knows. There have been temptations before, dressed up as financial security and academic opportunities some people not only would, but have killed for, and she has first-hand experience of how deals like that end. Two years sweating anonymously in Paraguay for starters, and a lifetime of paranoia thereafter.

James says, “Can I not give you a present?” hinting at the sort of innocence neither of them has had in a decade.

“A present is a bouquet of flowers or a dinner reservation, not this,” she says, bribes of the past making bile rise in her throat. “Whatever it is you thought this might convey-” she starts, shoving the box at him just to get it out of her hands, and then stops at the confused look pinching his eyebrows together. _Say it in words_ was supposed to be the rest of her sentence, but they’re both so terrible at it, it leaves her aching and speechless.

“I thought it was rather self explanatory,” James says. His voice is the sort of measured that sets off a thousand alarms bells in her mind.

Madeleine can practically see the guard come up, can feel her insides awash with fear knowing she’s missed something crucial. She takes several steps back and examines the sequence of events again.

The trick of the garment bag in the bedroom is simple enough: an easy way to lure her into another room, but what for? Surely he wasn’t scared of her reaction, not with the way his face has gone now, and they both well know she’s not the type of person to shriek with shallow excitement at the prospect of something sparkly. There’s no misunderstanding there.

_But he’s hurt_ , she thinks, and her heart rate picks up at the realisation that she can’t place _why_. She spins her father’s ring in around her finger once, twice. It digs into her skin, hot on the side pressed into her palm and too large even on her middle finger, and it occurs to her this is all just an afterthought of the party - the dress, the ring, the way he’s been on his best behaviour ever since.

“James,” she says, “I can’t read your mind. I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, so you are going to have to put it into words.”

The silence that follows stretches on like a wasteland. “You know this, the necklace has nothing to do with you, or with money. I can’t accept it, because, when I was younger, my father used to try to buy my forgiveness and my affection with material things, always something that’s a little too nice to be turned down. He paid for Oxford,” she says and trails off. James knows the rest. “I can only assume-”

His eyes seem to go wild at the suggestion, darting helplessly from one little pinpoint marker of her expression to another, a beast assessing its hunter. “This isn’t… I haven’t done anything incriminating,” James says and there is a note of desperation to his voice. _The boy who cried wolf_ , Madeleine thinks, only he’s never pretended to be innocent in the first place, not with her.

He asks, “Is this not what people do when they are in love?” and her world turns upside down, stumbles to a standstill, and collapses all in one breath.

Neither of them has uttered that word since Blofeld’s desert complex, the notion completely off limits even though the feeling has been quietly building and blossoming all around them.

That first time, Madeleine said it in a rush of relief so powerful, her brain simply short circuited. She hadn’t loved him then (not like this anyway), but she needed James to recognise her, because after her father’s death, he was and still is the only person who could even remotely understand her. The loss of that would have been too monumental to bear, half of herself lost somewhere in his broken mind, only she was still there, wholly formed and unforgettable.

“I suppose it is, for some people,” she says.

“And you?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a long time,” she says truthfully, thinking back to Paris nine years ago. But that had not been the same at all; back then she had been infatuated with the idea of an uncomplicated relationship, and this is anything but. “I could be,” Madeleine says, “but these types of things cannot ever be an apology, or a preemptive bribe.”

“All right. So, if it’s an expression of gratitude, no strings attached, you’ll take it?”

She nods and accepts the box when he offers it up again, rising to her tiptoes to place a soft kiss on his lips as his arms snake behind her back. “Thank you.”

They end up simply standing there for a while, rooted together, with a box of diamonds between them.

 

* * *

 

The following week, Madeleine wakes to the undignified scramble of trying to find her ringing phone while half trapped in the sheets and the grasp of sound sleep. She finds her phone beside the lamp on the bedside table, trying and failing to clear her voice as she pulls it up to her ear.

“Allô?”

She sounds bad even to her own ears, but she hasn’t set an alarm in weeks and, having gotten into the habit of staying up with James, who seems to get by on five hours of sleep a night, is rarely up before ten these days. Judging by the way it’s half light out and the shower is running in the other room, it must be close to eight.

Somewhere between those two observations, she realises whom she’s on the phone with. It isn’t a long conversation, but it’s long enough for James to come out of the shower, wrapped in a towel and raising an eyebrow at her. Madeleine makes a sign for him to be quiet and manages to get through to the end without incident, though she erupts in unkempt glee as soon as she hangs up.

“I got the position in Lyon!” she says, phone clutched to her chest in an attempt to contain herself.

“Without an interview?”

“Yes, one of my old professors is running a research programme at the facility and he recognised my thesis. Apparently he assumed the name change was because I married.” She laughs, bright enough to be infectious. She’d applied to the position on a whim, the only job outside Paris she’d sent enquiries to.

“Congratulations,” James says, and it is only then that she notices he’s half dressed, shirt open and life on hold to share a moment with her. “When do you start?”

“In four weeks. That isn’t too soon, is it?” There’s an unspoken agreement between them that he would go with her, but the reality of the scenario is too surreal for her to grasp even now. “I could probably get an extension-”

“Madeleine, don’t worry. Four weeks is plenty of time. The inquest should be closed in two and there is hardly anything to pack. You can redecorate with all new furniture when we get there.”

“We’re really doing this then?”

“Yes.”

She breaks out in a grin so wide it hurts.

 

* * *

 

The end of the inquest seems like a day that will never come until it does. It’s a cool Wednesday afternoon during a week she’s been called in to provide one last additional testimony. Behind the scenes the wrapping everything up involves a lot of paperwork. Madeleine only signs three documents and stands in the hallway waiting for James. He is preceded by M, who comes out of the room behind the two way mirror lending a window into his interview.

“Doctor Swann,” he says. “How are you?”

“Well, these days, thank you.” She glances at the sheaf of papers cradled in one of his arms, and says, “I imagine you must be pleased to finally put this matter to rest.”

“I think everyone is, though the events of the past few months can hardly ever be forgotten.”

“Revolutions rarely are,” she says, not talking of the SIS at all.

“Certainly. I hear you are departing for France again in some weeks and that Bond is coming with you.”

Madeleine nods. They’re almost entirely packed with two square metres of space rented in the back of a larger truck headed to Lyon in advance. She and James intend to drive his Aston, spending a few days in Paris by themselves, nothing to tie them to anything other than each other for a short moment. She can hardly tell M she would drift anywhere with James.

Too much time drags on, so M says, “Congratulations. I know I won’t have to worry about him so long as he is with you,” in that paced voice of his. It’s the closest thing to being adopted into this strange family built entirely on sarcasm, secrets, and civic duty. She doesn’t know why it suddenly makes her feel watery.

“I’ll take care of him.”

“He’ll do the same for you,” M says and shifts, about to leave, “If I haven’t thanked you for your service to the British public yet, please accept my sincerest gratitude now. I truly wish you two the best.”

“Thank you.”

At that moment, the door to the interview room opens, James joining them with his hands in his pockets. “What’s going on here?”

“Some last minute advice on keeping you in check,” M says, “Be on your best behaviour, Bond.”

“Sir.”

The men shake hands, a firm pump that conveys a thousand well wishes neither can say out loud. “Best of luck,” M adds when he takes her hand and Madeleine sincerely wishes the same for him.

 

* * *

 

They spend their last week drinking in every ounce of London: the rose garden in Hyde Park just about to bloom, weaving through the press of people in Trafalgar square on a Saturday afternoon hand in hand, running up and down mosaic tunnels to catch the tube back home late at night.

Madeleine doesn’t know how or at what cost he manages to squeeze them in at a restaurant she spotted in the paper the week before, but that’s where she finds herself one night, seated for an eight course meal. She wonders what they must look like to the world, two beautiful people dressed to nines without a visible mark to betray the horrors they’ve witnessed and committed.

The maître d' smiles at them like they’re the sort of sympathetic people others automatically assume the best of, and the irony of it gets caught in half a smirk curving upward in the corner of her mouth. He must think she’s an heiress, what with how the sequins on her moonlight lavender dress catch in the light and the way the unapologetic cluster of diamonds hanging from her neck glitters. She knows James gets off on the deception, and Madeleine can see why.

There’s a thrill to being someone else for a night, except, if she wanted to, this could be the rest of her life. They’re not playing pretend anymore. The thought is heady in a way that leaves her a little dizzy and guzzling her wine.

She lets herself sink into the warmth of the house white, telling James childhood anecdotes about Lyon in staccato French. He pays attention like a well trained dog, mostly because he’s struggling to keep up with the flurry of her native tongue, but the fact that he’s so keen only drives her to litter her speech with little, harder to catch afterthoughts.

Every now and then, they are fed a new course, redolent wines swapped out and refilled quietly. Her English has a heavier accent when she asks after the fried brussels sprouts in one of the miniature main courses, mouth slithering back into the familiar retroflexes and swallowed vowels of her mother tongue, her words devolving slowly between the starter and the second dessert.

The last course comes well past midnight when the restaurant is nearly empty and she’s veering on drunk. This time they’re attended personally by the maître d', two paper thin chocolate domes swept onto the table.

“With compliments from the chef, we have a modern interpretation of the classic strawberry shortcake in a bittersweet dark chocolate dome,” the man says, pouring thin lines of melted white chocolate across the dusted tops until the crust wields under the heat.

It’s the sort of breathtaking culinary exhibition that has Madeleine gasping in awe before she even sees the inside: a swirl of cream dotted with wild strawberries sitting on the petal framed piece of shortcake, and, at the very top, resting on a slice of a bleeding ripe strawberry, a ring that takes her breath away once and for all.

“James-”

She doesn’t dare touch it, afraid it’ll cease to exist if she does. When Madeleine looks up at him, she’s astounded by how James can appear perfectly calm when she can barely contain even the surface of herself.

“I have to be sure you’re not just bringing me along as your boy toy, don’t I?”

“But marriage?” Madeleine asks, skeptical. She’s all too aware of the people around them, everyone watching out of the corner of their eye as the scene drags on, probably praying there will be something to celebrate so things don’t get awkward.

“I’m not asking you to marry me tomorrow, or in a week, or even a year,” he says, “But somewhere down the line, I hope to know you’ll take me in eyes of the law too, even though, in my eyes, I’m already yours for the keeping.”

And he’s right. They won’t ever have a fairytale family wedding or a three bedroom house with two and a half kids and a labrador, but she can well imagine signing herself over in an anonymous magistrate. In fact, she’s so certain of it, an alternative without him has stopped existing weeks ago.

“All right,” she says, and he lowers himself to one knee beside the table, fishing the ring out of her forgotten dessert.

“Madeleine Swann,” James says, the ghost of a smile dancing over his face, “Will you do me the honour of making an honest man out of me?”

“Yes.”

She doesn’t know who tears up first, her or the waitress pressing a gloved hand to her mouth, but she knows she’s the first to start crying at the cheers that erupt from the kitchen, three eavesdropping chefs craning their necks to follow the scene, and she laughs, voice raspy with tear stained happiness.

 

* * *

 

Their last morning in London is the sort of bleak, half-wet day with a touch of sunlight she’s come to expect of England. Standing at the corner below the white archway that’s the entry to the new MI6, Madeleine thinks she might even come to miss it. Somehow everything about the city reminds her of James, something well-worn with layers upon layers of history hidden under new coats of white paint, but she’s got the original to keep, with the ridiculous car he drives up to the curb right beside her.

“Sometimes you’re like a little boy pretending to be an adult,” she tells him when he flashes a grin at her like he owns the world, “No sensible person would ever want to drive a car like this.”

“Made you do a double take though, didn’t it?”

“You’re impossible,” Madeleine mutters and tosses her coat into the back seat as she climbs in. She puts her seatbelt on, tugging at the brand new stiffness of of it for a moment before it gives way. Feeling strangely as though she’s in the last scene of a film, about to drive off into the sunset, she touches the back of her ring and thinks of how far they’ve come.

“Ready?” James asks, revving the engine once.

She rolls her eyes and says: “Get on with it already or we’ll never make it to Paris before dark.”

And, just like that, they are off, greeted by a sunrise wedged between two rows of London’s white terraced houses stretching on endlessly.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you're wondering about the timeline used in this fic in relation to SPECTRE, I relied on the addition to [this meta post](http://obfuscatress.tumblr.com/post/155533441222/hi-just-wondering-if-you-knewcould-guess-how) as reference. Please note the first answer given isn't correct and I've cited canon to construct the actual timeline of the events in the movie in my response. Anything referenced as having occurred before SPECTRE will be compliant with the timeline established in [yellow smoke (rub your muzzle on the window pane).](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7156928)
> 
> In terms of locations: [According to IMDb,](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2379713/locations) the exterior of Bond's flat in London was filmed at Stanley Crescent, Notting Hill, so I've used that here as place of residence as well. Unfortunately, I didn’t figure out where some of the locations related to the new MI6 were until after I’d written this fic and then couldn’t be arsed to fix it anymore. Both the restaurant Bond proposes in and the bar where his retirement party was held are entirely made up, if vaguely inspired by actual places I’ve been to.
> 
> For anyone who wants to yell about rarepairs with me, you can find me on tumblr at [obfuscatress.tumblr.com](http://obfuscatress.tumblr.com/) or on twitter [@shippress.](https://twitter.com/Shippress)


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